Introduction to AWS Compute

AWS compute is an Infrastructure As A Service(IAAS). Put simply, AWS compute is the means to provision and manage infrastructure(virtual machines/containers) for your use case. AWS provides many flexible computing services so as to meet the requirements of business organizations like  Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), Amazon Lightsail, AWS Lambda and many more. This infrastructure as a service can be considered as the processing power required by your applications, to host applications or run computation-intensive tasks. In AWS, with the use of these computing services, users can dynamically provision the number of resources they are using and then pay only for the computing resources they have used for. From, this leads to the reduction of the upfront capital investment required.

These compute resources are closely related to regular server components like CPU and RAM. However, for regular server components, you need to manage and buy the infrastructure, provide for backups and emergency recovery, and ensure enough server capacity to handle traffic-intensive times. With AWS compute all this headache is handed over to the AWS team. They manage the infrastructure and ensure the recovery of your application in case of any system failures. As a user, you only pay for the services you provide for as long as you provide them. 

AWS Compute was one of the first services to be provided by AWS back in 2006 providing only a single EC-2 instance type. Amazon EC2 is the most commonly used AWS service because this service can integrate with many other features and services like Auto Scaling, Elastic Block Store(EBS), Elastic Network Interface(ENI), Elastic Load Balancer(ELB), Amazon Machine Image(AMI), Instance Store, Elastic IP, Placements Groups, Security Groups and many more. 

Features of AWS Compute:

• Scalability: This is one of the most beneficial features of using cloud infrastructures. Scalability means that your application server can scale up vertically(increase computational capacity or other features of your resource) or horizontally(provision more similar resources) to handle user needs. Needless to say that you will only pay for the scaled-up instance and nothing for using this scalability feature. 
  
• Multi-Utility services: AWS Compute provides resources that can be provisioned and run for years and years, as long as the users make their payments (EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk). Simultaneously you can also utilize a compute resource for a few milliseconds for small tasks(AWS Lambda). 
  
• Wide scope of categories: Compute resources can be provisioned from a range of categories, with each being utilized for different lengths of time. Providing full flexibility to the user for their use case. 
  
• Ethernet speed: Compute resources can utilize Ethernet speeds of up to 100Gbps. 
  
• Multiple locations: Compute can be used across a range of 22 Regions and 69 Availability zones spread across the globe as needed by the users. 
  

The only drawback of AWS Compute is that, given a massive amount of services and further types of those services it can sometimes be difficult to choose which service is best suited for your use case. However, AWS has a really good support and community and explanation videos that can help you with this drawback. 

AWS Compute Services:

• EC-2 (Elastic Cloud Compute): Virtual servers that can be used for all kinds of use cases. The most underlying platform of the next generation of EC2 instances is AWS Nitro System. The Server environments for EC2 is called instances. The OS Package and some additional installations in the reusable template of EC2 is known as Amazon Machine Images.
• Amazon Lightsail:  One of the easiest AWS services. Easily set-up virtual servers for small applications and websites. Less configurations need as compared to EC2 or other AWS Compute services. Lightsail have all the facilities that includes everything which user needs for their  websites and web applications such as virtual machine (choose either Linux or Windows OS), SSD-based storage, data transfer and many more. 
• ECS (Elastic Container Service): Used to run docker based container applications. so, Elastic Container Service is a regional service. ECS is mainly used to create a deployment environment, batch scaling, build experience and manages the scaling.
• ECR (Elastic Container Registry): Efficient an easy way to store, manage, and deploy container images. This compute service is a regional service. 
• EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service): Fully managed Kubernetes service. EKS allows you to run the Kubernetes on AWS without any installation needed, operating, or maintenance.
• AWS Lambda: Server less container to run code. Users are charged according to the time Lambda was used in multiples of 100ms. With Lambda, you can run code in programming language such as Node.js, Java, C#, Go, Python, Ruby, PowerShell.
• AWS Fargate: Serverless compute service for containers. This Compute Service works with the combination of both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).
• AWS EC2 AutoScaling: Set up policies (criteria) to automatically scale up/own the applications. With AWS Auto Scaling, the scaling setup of applications became easy for the multiple resources.
• AWS Batch: Fully managed batch processing at any scale. This manages the job queues and compute environments. So, AWS Batch is a regional service that helps in running the batch jobs in multiple Availability Zones within a region.
• AWS Compute Optimizer: Recommends appropriate compute resource features based on your use case.
• EC2 Image Builder: Build and maintain secure Linux or Windows Server images.
• ELB (Elastic Load Balancing): All requests to compute resources go through ELB. ELB distributes request load between underlying server instances.
• AWS Outposts: Run AWS infrastructure and services on premises for a truly consistent hybrid cloud experience. Can be used by large enterprises that need extra security.
• AWS Wavelength: Delivery ultra-low latency application for 5G devices.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: This service allows the user without worrying about the infrastructure to run those applications which can quickly deploy in the AWS Cloud.
• AWS Local Zones: Run latency sensitive applications closer to end-users.
• Amazon EC2 Spot Instances: Take advantage of unused EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.